Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 48 - Ghoul's Night Out

I didn’t think it was possible, but VertiBucks were even louder when you were riding in them. If it wasn’t for Destiny patching the armor’s radio into the local network, I wouldn’t have been able to hear anything except the drone of the engines.

“I thought they’d be bigger on the inside!” I yelled over the drone of the twin props. For how huge they seemed on the outside, we had to pack in like sardines to fit all the ponies riding down to the surface. It was me, Cube, Ornate Orate, and three soldiers in light armor, plus the pilot sitting up front and Destiny, but the pilot wasn’t really taking up space with us and Destiny was only present in spirit.

“We’re just lucky it could take off with your fat flank in it!” Cube shouted back. She smirked and folded her arms. She hadn’t bothered with a suit of armored barding so she was either confident in her magic or didn’t actually expect trouble.

“You’re right,” I agreed. “The last few I took out, the engines were the weak point! They’re always overstressed!”

I saw the soldiers look at each other when I said that. The leader tapped me on the shoulder.

“You shot down VertiBucks?” he asked.

“I don’t like to brag.” I shrugged lightly, not wanting to move too much in the cramped cabin. “I’ve only downed a few of them solo. One was practically an accident! I didn’t mean to cut through the hydraulic lines!”

The soldier nodded. “I guess that’s what it’s like in special forces! I’m Lieutenant Jet Stream.” He offered his hoof, and I shook it. “These two are Masher and Grouse. Have you ever been to the surface before?”

“You could say that,” I acknowledged.

“What about her?” he nodded to Cube. The whole VertiBuck shuddered as we hit turbulence, the floor tilting. All of us grabbed for the hoofholds and railings in the transport, hanging on while we waited for the danger to pass. I had to resist the urge to bail out. I’d seen how badly these things did when something went wrong -- they had a glide ratio that can be characterized as ‘falling out of the sky’.

“I can take care of myself,” Cube stated firmly. The transport shook again and she looked at us with disdain, totally unconcerned. “We’re only letting you three come along to play foalsitter for the professor.”

“She’ll be fine,” I said. “What can you tell me about the drop location?”

Jet Stream nodded, straightening up as the ride smoothed out. “The area in front of the facility is clear. We won’t have to hike there. Locals aren’t a problem either -- even before the war, this was in the middle of nowhere.”

“It was a terribly high-security installation,” Ornate Orate added. “It was deliberately built far from population centers. But it was also a Ministry of Arcane Science facility, and that means one thing -- there was an extensive amount of paperwork! You remember the question I asked during the lecture you attended?”

“The volume of books a printing press was able to crank out meant that at least a few examples would survive and keep knowledge alive,” I said.

“Exactly so! A-plus! It’s the same idea here. The Ministry created so much documentation about this secret location that we were able to positively identify it even two centuries later just by cross-referencing entries in tables and balance sheets. Twilight Sparkle’s ministry didn’t believe in black budgets with no accountability.”

I nodded and touched my helmet, cutting the microphone. “Hey Destiny, you were Twilight’s friend, right?”

“Something like that,” the ghost admitted quietly, speaking so only I could hear her.

“Do you think it’s possible you might have just given her production samples of parts, and that’s how that junk ended up where they found it?”

“No,” Destiny said. “There were signs that the parts we found had already been installed onboard the Exodus White. They weren’t fresh off an assembly line.”

“Great, one mystery after another,” I muttered.

---

I followed along behind Ornate Orate and looked up at the facility. It looked like a highway tunnel, just a road leading straight into a mountain, but without even a glimmer of light from the other side.

“This is actually quite an old site, with a very troubled history,” Ornate Orate said, with the same tone he’d used while he was lecturing in front of a class. “Most Ministry facilities were built from the ground up as part of Equestria’s wartime boom in industry and construction. What must be remembered, though, is that there was a time before the Ministries. Princess Celestia ran a monarchy for a thousand years, and the institutions that existed then - the EUP, the Royal Guard, and so on - had their own bases, training facilities, and so forth.”

The shadow of the mountain fell over us, and a chill went down my spine.

“This was, before the Ministry of Arcane Science took it over, a Night Guard base. You can still see the old livery in some parts of the facility.” He pointed off to the side where a faded crest was painted on the concrete, a shield cradled by bat wings. “Before it was renamed to the very clinical ‘Site K1’, the Night Guard called this place Mogila Uzhasov. It translates to something like ‘Fear’s Grave’ or ‘The Tomb of Horrors’.”

“That’s not ominous at all,” Cube scoffed. “Did they hang Nightmare Night decorations around, too?”

“The Night Guard primarily tasked themselves with securing and containing dangerous artifacts and monsters,” Ornate Orate explained. “They were an old organization with a mind toward the future -- consider your own reaction. Without knowing anything except the name, you’re already cautious. I believe they wanted to keep intruders away from anything dangerous even if the Night Guard was no longer there to stop them.”

“It didn’t seem to stop you,” I said.

Ornate Orate chuckled. “I’ve seen quite a few warnings of curses and terrible fates that would befall anypony foolish enough to disturb a tomb. You start to become rather inured to them after a while. These days I would be much more worried about finding fresh paint than ancient inscriptions. Living ponies are far more dangerous than anything you’d find in the average ruin.”

We trotted into the tunnel, and the night-vision in my helmet snapped on, casting everything into monochrome green and black.

“We have a camp set up just past the main security door,” Ornate Orate said.

I looked up at the thick iron door. It was a slab of metal on hinges thicker than I was, just a big rectangular block hanging half open. It wasn’t a work of art but it definitely seemed like it would survive the end of the world, no matter which side of the door the apocalypse happened to. “I kind of expected it to look more like a Stable door.”

When we walked through, the lights inside almost blinded me, the night vision leaving stars in my eyes before it switched off. I rubbed my face, or tried and ended up scraping my hoof against my helmet. I stumbled after the professor, trying to blink through the flash-blindness.

“Sorry,” Destiny whispered.

“You’ve been in a Stable?” Ornate Orate said, sounding pleased. “Excellent! The pony in charge of the excavation just came away from an assignment at an abandoned Stable. There she is now, maybe you two can compare your experiences! Yukon Gold, I’d like you to meet--”

Somepony screamed. My vision cleared, and I saw a vaguely familiar pony fallen back on her flanks and pointing at me in fear.

“The Blue Devil!” she shrieked. “She came to finish me off!”

I frowned and took a minute to figure out where I knew her from. “Oh! You were in Stable 83!” I smiled and offered a hoof to shake. “How’s it going?”

She didn’t shake my hoof. I became aware that everypony was staring at me.

“What?” I asked.

“So you two have met?” Ornate Orate asked, still sounding happy and a little oblivious to the feeling in the room. “How wonderful!”

---

It took a little while and half a bottle of vodka for Yukon Gold to calm down. When she realized I wasn’t here to finish her off as a loose end, she opened up quite a bit. Cube had immediately become bored and gone off to shoot at some giant bugs she’d spotted, and Jet Stream and the other soldiers were, in theory, helping Ornate Orate unload some equipment that we’d brought along with us. In practice, they were listening to his lecture on dating artifacts in situ.

“This place is cursed,” Yukon Gold said. She took another sip of vodka from her metal mess kit cup. I refilled it and poured myself a little more too. “You showing up is just another sign. I shouldn’t even be surprised at this point.”

I nodded. I’d taken my helmet off so Destiny could float around. Everypony had been surprisingly okay with it, aside from one more small panic attack from Yukon Gold and a lot of promises to the professor to do an interview later.

“I’m sorry about scaring you,” I said.

“This place makes me jumpy,” Yukon said. “It makes everypony jumpy. I don’t know if there’s something off with the air circulation or something, but nopony sleeps well. We have to rotate through ponies just to give them a break. That’s why I’m alone here.”

She paused and took a sip and looked into the shadows.

“I think,” she whispered.

The whole place had a strange aura to it -- the first room we’d walked into had been relatively modern, all concrete and steel. It reminded me of just about every other military facility I’d been in, as long as I didn’t look at the details. None of the wiring or plumbing was built into the walls, and so conduits and wire were strung from place to place to service hanging lights. When I saw the way the door further back led into a cave, it made me recontextualize the place. This wasn’t a base built into the mountain, it was an outpost at the entrance to a cave complex.

“The artifacts came from here?” Destiny asked.

Yukon shook her head and motioned towards the cave. “There’s a path that goes further into the caves. If you follow it, there’s another set of rooms. They’re set up as a low-security laboratory, and that’s where everything we recovered came from.”

“Can you show us the way?” Destiny asked.

“You can… you can follow the path. We installed lights along the way. I won’t…” Yukon shivered. “I don’t like going there on my own.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “We can find our way there. What do you think, Destiny? Is the Exodus White down here?” I asked.

“No way,” Destiny said. “How would it get here?”

“There could be a crash site on the other side of the mountain,” I suggested. “Maybe it flew right into the mountain like the Exodus Blue?”

“The Exodus Blue fell into a volcano,” Destiny reminded me. “If an Exodus Ark hit a mountain and just fell apart there would be a debris field the size of a small city. And that still wouldn’t explain how any of it ended up in here!”

“While you’re here, you can take a crack at the terminals if you want,” Yukon Gold suggested. “There’s no local network, so each one only has local data. It was some kind of information security measure. They didn’t want information from deeper inside in high-security areas to be accessed from anywhere else.”

“You haven’t broken the security?” Destiny asked.

“I do hardware, not software,” Yukon explained. “My job as site supervisor is to get systems back online and identify anything useful or dangerous.” She shook her head. “The student who was supposed to help with the computers couldn’t take it. She went back home after one night! The surface was just too much for her.”

“Let me show you how an expert deals with terminals,” Destiny said. “Imagine I’m cracking my neck. I can’t do it because I don’t have bones.”

“...Do I have bones?” I asked.

“You’ve had too much vodka,” Yukon said, taking the bottle away from me. She refilled her own glass and kept the bottle. I rolled my eyes and let her have it. Destiny tapped on the keys with her magic for a few moments.

“Better encryption than usual, but it’s still just Stable-Tec junk,” she said. “Looking through these files… most of it is junk. I think this was connected to a timeclock system, so almost all of the storage is just clock-in and clock-out times and user IDs. Oh! Somepony left a recording on this.”

“Play it,” I said. Destiny nodded and the speakers on the terminal crackled.

“Journal entry number one. This is Twilight Sparkle, and this record is serving as my personal journal for the duration of this handover project.” She sounded older than I expected, more weary and worldly than she had when in the memory orb I’d seen. There was still an edge of excitement to her voice, like a filly on Hearth’s Warming Eve. “This is actually my second day on the site. The Night Guard weren’t happy about this. The ponies here don’t seem to know much about what’s going on outside the facility -- part of their information security, apparently. Zero contact. If I hadn’t brought a royal decree from Princess Luna I doubt they’d have let me in at all.

“All the equipment here is outdated. We’re installing terminals and running wiring as we go, but this is going to be a larger project than I expected. Still, I’m hopeful! This site was used to seal away dangerous knowledge and artifacts. Even in the best of times, I would want a chance to examine a treasure trove like this, but right now? Too many ponies are getting hurt in the war. Yesterday’s dangerous might be today’s war-winning innovation.

“I feel like I’m rambling. Am I rambling? I usually do this in text, but without the world’s best assistant here, I’m relying on a voice recorder. I suppose I could write down a script to follow and then record that, but it would sort of defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it? I’ll just use these as personal references and make an edited report later. Oh right, note to self - back up journal entries on the local terminals. Better safe than sorry.

“I’m ending my first entry here. Um… is there some kind of standard way to end a voice recording? I’ll need to do research for next time. Maybe I should ask around? It’s only for my personal use but that’s no excuse not to do it correctly. I guess I’ll just, um. Bye!”

The speakers fell silent with one final pop of feedback.

“So she was here investigating this place just like us, huh?” I asked. “If she was directly in charge that really might explain some things. I still think it’s likely that you just gave her those parts from the White, Destiny. You two were friends, after all.”

“It’s just… I don’t know,” Destiny said. “It doesn’t feel right.”

“Are there any other recordings?” Yukon Gold asked, slurring her words just a little.

“No. There could be entries on other terminals. They’re not networked, so we’ll have to manually check them one at a time.”

“If it’s local, we should go to that low-security lab you mentioned,” I said. “This is a backup, yeah? So if she took notes on things she was studying, they’d be on the terminals over in the lab.”

“You’re right,” Destiny said. “Let’s see if the others are ready to go.”

---

“I’m not going back there,” Yukon Gold said. “I don’t care if you demote me or send me back to the Enclave…” she paused. “Actually that sounds good! Demote me and send me back to the Enclave!”

I sighed. “How about instead you stay here and keep the lights on, and we’ll leave somepony here so you’re not alone?”

“I’ll stay,” Grouse volunteered. “One of us should be here anyway. Somepony needs to keep an eye on that front door and make sure we don’t get sealed inside.”

“Permission granted,” Lieutenant Jet Stream said, nodding. He turned to address the rest of us. “According to the site supervisor, the next point of interest is along the lit path. We’ll be going through a natural cave for at least part of the length. Does anypony here have experience in underground operations?”

I raised my hoof. So did Ornate Orate.

“Is there anything important we should know?” he asked.

Ornate Orate nodded for me to go on. I cleared my throat. “Okay, so the most dangerous thing about natural caverns is that they’re easy to get lost in. Everything goes against you -- it’s pitch black. What you do see all looks basically the same. Even sounds echo in ways you don’t expect. If they’ve already done the hard part and given us a lit path to follow, we should stay on it. Don’t go off the path. If you think you see or hear something, or if there’s an emergency like you get hurt or need to use the bathroom, tell somepony and never do anything alone.”

“Those are all excellent tips,” Ornate Orate agreed. “Everypony make sure you have at least two light sources. If you get lost or lose sight of everypony, stop where you are and radio in.”

Jet Stream nodded. “Masher, you take point. I’ll take the rear position.”

“All of you are acting like this is some kind of dangerous mission,” Cube scoffed. “We’re literally walking from one room to the next! If you can’t even manage that, what are you going to do the first time somepony takes a shot at you?”

She pushed past us and stormed through the open doors into the cave beyond.

“Darnit, Cube…” I went after her, giving Jet Stream an apologetic look. He shook his head and sighed, shrugging. Destiny floated after me, keeping station just behind my right shoulder.

Walking into the cave felt like going outside. The path was well-marked, with a concrete walkway that was still in excellent condition. A chain was strung between chest-high poles on both sides, probably so even if the lights went out, ponies could still avoid wandering anywhere dangerous. Lights were strung just beyond the chain, work lights on stands that seemed like they were intended to be temporary, half of them burned out and a lot of the others twisted and pointing in the wrong direction, like somepony had used them to try and find something in the expanse of shadow and stone beyond the concrete ribbon.

“You know, I don’t say this often, but this place is creepy,” Destiny said.

“No kidding,” I agreed. With the angles of the lights, I kept thinking I saw motion in the corner of my eye, but it was just the way the shadows stretched and merged together.

“I told you there was nothing to worry about,” Cube said, looking back over her shoulder at me. “You’re all just acting like babies.”

“Then you won’t mind going in first, right?” I asked.

We both looked up ahead. It was like an office building had been teleported into the cave. It was a wall of windows and metal cladding, most of it flat grey. A band of dark purple broke up the shapes, and it was clear some poor architect had tried their best to make it look welcoming. With the underlighting and all those dark windows, it had an effect a bit like a pony giving you a smile that was just a little too wide and empty.

“I’m getting some strange magical traces,” Destiny said. “I’m trying to identify it. It’s at the very edge of my ability to sense it.”

“I can feel it too,” Cube said softly. “It’s like… hm. When I’m on the Juniper, there’s a vibration in the floor any time the engines are running. You don’t really notice it after a while but it’s always there.”

“I’ll take point,” I said, flying past her and to the doorway. There was no big metal security door here. It was the kind of glass door you’d expect from a corner store. I pushed it open and looked around, Destiny using her magic to shine a cone of light around.

Inside, beyond a front desk, the space was separated into rooms with walls of half-frosted glass, translucent up to just over my eye level, making everything inside effectively invisible.

“The lights outside are working, so there should be power,” Cube said, peering past me. With how short she was, she could just look through my legs. “Find a light switch.”

I nodded and stepped behind the desk. Destiny scanned the walls.

“Maybe this?” she asked. There was a sharp buzz, and the overhead lights came to life.

I saw it in the corner of my eye, something tall and black and standing right behind one of those walls of frosted glass, the sudden light making it cast a shadow and revealing it-- and it was gone when I looked, because it was just my nerves. I gingerly opened the door, my heart still beating twice as fast as it should have been. Inside was a conference room. An ancient plastic plant was up against the corner. It must have cast the shadow I’d seen.

It must’ve.

“They said it was low-security, but this is silly,” Cube snorted. “There’s no security at all!”

“If a pony can get this far, a simple locked door or warning sign wouldn’t be much use, hm?” Ornate Orate asked, when he stepped through the door. “It’s quite a wonderful example of the construction of the era! You can see how they converted this space from a larger warehouse and sectioned it off. All of these glass panels were prefabricated, of course. With the extra wall units, carpet squares, and drop ceiling, it’s a bit like a building inside a building. Where older construction used masonry and stone as load-bearing walls, this shows the wartime method of a more flexible and prefabricated frame structure equipped with standardized parts. It enabled much faster construction, though it does mean a lot of buildings end up looking extremely similar.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Cube sighed. “We get it. Everything looks the same because it all came out of the same factory.”

Destiny floated down the hallway, and I followed her, opening doors and looking inside. The first room was full of dead, brown plants. The next had rocks and a few glittering gems. The third was a library, but one organized in some bizarre way that must have made sense to somepony. There were single stacks of books reaching almost all the way to the ceiling tiles, like the paper remembered it had once been part of a tree and wanted to be a forest again. A terminal screen glowed on the desk against the far wall, the cursor blinking and glowing green.

“It has to be here somewhere,” Destiny muttered, peering over the frosted glass and into the rooms beyond. “Here! Chamomile, this one!”

I popped the door, and Destiny rushed in, flitting from one shelf to another.

“This is it. Look! These are parts of the Ark’s structural framework, and these circuit boards are definitely from BrayTech! Look around and see if you can find a manifest about where all this came from!”

“Got it,” I said.

I started checking through the shelves. I spotted something on the side of a rack of twisted bits of metal, and found a clipboard hanging from a hook, still clutching a ream of tissue-thin sheets.

I flipped through the crackling, dry paper, stiff with age. “This looks like transfer paperwork. Um… hold on. Why are these forms so complicated?” There had to be three pages for everything on the shelf, every one of those in triplicate on transfer paper with different colors. It was the mark of somepony obsessed with order to the point of mania. “Here we go… it says this was originally found…” I trailed off. “At Mogila Uzhasov?”

“You must be reading it wrong,” Destiny said, taking the clipboard from me and flipping through the pages with her magic. She flipped back and forth through them, clearly getting frustrated. “This doesn’t make any sense! How could the parts be found here?”

“Maybe it just means she found them in the crates here?” I guessed.

“And the dates! They’re even more impossible! They’re before the Exodus White was even built! If the initial recovery dates are right… well they can’t be right! They’re not just a little off, they’re wrong by decades! It wouldn’t just predate the construction, it would predate me!”

“So the paperwork must be wrong, then,” I said.

Destiny paused, then nodded. “Yeah. It’s the only answer. We’re missing some big piece of the puzzle.”

“If Twilight spent much time here, she might have backed up more journal entries to the local terminals. She might explain something there.”

“I’m starting to think you might actually be the smart one,” Destiny joked. “Sorry for making you do all the thinking. I just… I thought we really had a lead. And we do! But I have no idea where it’s trying to point us.”

“I saw a library a few doors back that had a working terminal,” I said. “Let’s start there.”

---

“It looks like there were quite a few entries, but most of them were deleted or corrupted,” Destiny said, after a frustrating half-hour wrestling with the terminal, ten minutes of which involved me bumping into a stack of priceless books and knocking them over. Ornate Orate had nearly had a heart attack and was still going through the pile, explaining how every single one of the books, while they had no real practical value, were extremely historically important.

Cube had vanished again. I assumed she’d gotten bored and went off to find something to shoot at. I flipped through the books and waited for Destiny to finish with her hacking. I pushed one volume of a badly outdated (even by pre-war standards) dictionary out of the way and saw something behind it. It was a small statue of a pony. I picked it up to look at it. The pony was pale pink, almost white, an alicorn with swirls of purple and blue in her mane and a look on her face that I couldn’t quite place.

"Huh," I said. "Who's this?"

“Princess Flurry Heart,” Destiny said, after a quick glance. “The greatest deterrent the Empire ever had. It’s terrible, what happened to the dragons, but they were asking for it.”

“...What happened to the dragons?” I asked.

“She did. They really shouldn’t have eaten her cat."

"Be Decisive," I read, the words inscribed on the statue's base. I shrugged and put it away with the rest of my junk. “Can you recover anything?”

“Just the oldest entry,” Destiny said. “Here.”

She hit play, and the terminal crackled to life, the lights flickering.

“Twilight Sparkle’s Journal, entry two. Right now I’m in a low-security holding area, and I’ve started repurposing it as a laboratory. It seems like an excellent location for some of the more delicate equipment. There’s not much of note here in storage -- it seems like the artifacts here are all safe enough to just be crated up and forgotten about.

“The remaining Night Guard staff has been less than helpful with getting an inventory. They definitely resent my presence here, and they don’t seem to have many records. I don’t know why they’re so worried about information security. It’s not just that they’re worried about secrets getting out, they almost seem worried to find anything out for themselves! I don’t think much testing has been done at all on what they’ve locked away.

“The artifact I’m looking at now is a good example. It’s definitely pony-made, but the material is bizarre. It’s a structural member, roughly one meter long and ten centimeters wide. One end is broken, and it seems to be some kind of foamed metal, like a sponge made of… titanium, I think? It’s significantly lighter than a solid titanium beam of the same dimensions but retains about ninety percent of the strength. If we could figure out how this was made, it would be a huge boon to construction!

“That’s one of the first things I found, and it was in a box with a bunch of junk. A coffee mug, some wall panels. They’re a little strange too, and I can’t identify any tooling marks, but there’s not much else of note about them except some writing in modern Equestrian. It looks like serial or batch numbers, along with the words ‘Exodus White’. I don’t know if that’s a manufacturer or model, and the Night Guard is…”

There was a loud, tired sigh on the recording.

“I’m too tired to deal with this. I haven’t been sleeping well since this project started. I think I’ve been having bad dreams, but I can’t remember them. I think it’s just the chaos of settling in to a new assignment, being away from my friends this long, the war…”

She was quiet for a long few seconds. When she started speaking again, it was quiet, almost a whisper.

“One of the mages I brought with me, Citrus Salad… He woke up screaming last night. He told us he was lying in bed and woke up feeling this presence in the room with him. It was something too tall and formless to be a pony, like a shadow just looming over him and… he said it hated him. He could tell it hated him so much.”

She cleared her throat and continued in a more normal tone, with only a little wobble under it from her exhaustion.

“It’s just a classic case of night terrors, of course. His brain was awake and his body wasn’t, and he just imagined the whole thing because of sensory deprivation. I’ve recommended some sleep aids that should assist with restful sleep.”

There was a long pause on the recording, along with the faint sound of a hoof tapping.

“I’m just not sure… I could ask Luna to check on their dreams. But she’s so busy…. No. She trusts me to get this done. The Ministries exist so she doesn’t have to do these little things directly and she can focus on the big picture. I’m not going to bother her about this. The medication will be enough. I’m sure of it.

“Anyway, I’m going to throw my weight around a little and get down to the high-security area tomorrow. If the staff is just going to get in my way, I’ll replace them all with ponies who will follow orders and do what I ask. I’ll update this journal once I’ve had a chance to survey the whole facility.”

The recording went silent with a sharp snap.

“She didn’t recognize the Exodus White’s parts?” I mumbled.

“So it really wasn’t any kind of industrial espionage, then,” Destiny sighed. “Unless they were hiding that from her, too? But she still should have known what she was looking at!”

“Want to go look at the high-security area?” I asked. “The transfer papers implied the Exodus White parts had to come from there.”

“So this is where you were,” Cube said. She looked around the little library. “Eaten any good books lately?”

“That joke is older than the dust in here,” I retorted.

“I heard you talking about the high security area,” Cube said, her expression more serious. “But there’s a problem.”

“What kind of problem?” I asked.

---

The door was sealed. And not just a little sealed. Whoever had wanted this door shut didn’t ever intend to get it open again. I could see marks from heat around the edges where it had been welded shut. If that wasn’t enough, metal disks with runes engraved on them had been glued over the seam between the two steel security doors, and the whole arrangement was glowing faintly.

“Have you ever seen anything like this?” I asked. I tapped the door. It felt solid and didn’t try to kill me.

“Never,” Destiny said. “The magical barrier is one thing, but all the rest…”

“I have,” Cube said. “The sealing spell is a hack, but it’s basically a bloodline spell. Only the caster or somepony related to them can get through.”

“And the caster was probably Twilight Sparkle,” I mumbled. “I don’t suppose anypony has a secret Ministry Mare in their saddlebags?”

“It’s theoretically possible to bypass that kind of lock,” Cube said, frowning. “But… it’s only theoretical, even if it worked we’d need a caster stronger than the Ministry Mare herself. I’m not that good yet. Give me a few years, and I can do it.”

“I don’t think we have that kind of time,” I said.

Ornate Orate sighed. “Sometimes investigations end like this. But look on the bright side! We’ve learned quite a bit, and nopony got hurt. Why, just the treasure trove of books we found is well worth the-- what are you doing with that knife?”

“Archaeology,” I said. Jet Stream nodded to me and ushered the older stallion back a few steps.

I cut into the wall next to the door, sparks flying and the professor making increasingly distressed sounds about the destruction of important artifacts and context. I made two more cuts and kicked, bending the thin sheet metal out of the way and revealing a square of ebon darkness leading to the space beyond.

“So, who wants to go first?” I asked.

Comments

[Reese]

So. Time travel, looks like. And ponies who were very uneager to learn more of the future. And a Twilight Sparkle wasn't wasn't going to be stopped from learning the forbidden knowledge... and then, following learning it, decided that it was nowhere near forbidden enough and she was going to do something about that.
And then Chamomile takes a direct approach past the security, into the mysterious space beyond.
Fun times! For us out here, at least! :D

edit:
11076214
Oh, thanks; I hadn't put that together either! :D
(Though, as I recall, I'd also forgotten her previous occupation by the time the pin came up.)

[howard035]

I always love it in dungeon exploring when they find the door is ridiculously sealed and just tunnel through a nearby wall instead.

[star1wars3]

It hit me while rereading that the mystery Twilight Sparkle in Destiny's memories might be EQG Twilight, I just remembered in the flashback she had glasses. It'd explain a lot of things odd about Destiny and Twilight knowing each other.

[Ahsoka Tano]

“You know, I don’t say this often, but this place is creepy,” Destiny said." Literally says that 80% of the dungeons lol.

time travel?

Chapter title is deceiving